Lawrence Stelter, author of By the El, is an architect for the City of New York. He received a master’s degree in city planning from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and his thesis was “Analysis of the New York City Policy of Demolishing Elevated Transit Lines” (1982). In addition to the history and romance of the city’s mass transit lines, his interests include general history, travel and photography. He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Lothar Stelter, the photographer, is now retired after a long career with the New York Telephone Co., a predecessor of Verizon. He sometimes paid fifty cents to building superintendents where he was installing phones to let him shoot pictures of the Third Avenue El from good vantage points. (He's holding the camera here with which he took many of the photos in the book.) Lothar Stelter is a product of the city schools, having graduated from Evander Childs High School in The Bronx before attending college. He and his wife of more than fifty years, Josephine Montelbano Stelter, live in Kew Garden Hills, Queens, where he, too, continues his fascination with the old elevated train system. He’s also keenly interested in film history.